


The World's Spinning On

by thewolvesintherain



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: AU, F/M, Fluff, Gen, so much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-17
Updated: 2013-10-17
Packaged: 2017-12-29 16:08:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1007388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewolvesintherain/pseuds/thewolvesintherain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(That life Chuck was so eager to get back to)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The World's Spinning On

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for: Mentioned/implied child abuse/ the end of the world and resulting ugliness/possible underage drinking/sex. Language and Extreme Fluffiness, as well as playing fast and loose with canon. If I've missed any warnings please let me know. The Herc - Stacker Bromance can possibly read as more if you have your slash goggles on, but I don't see it that way, so no warning. However, you're more than welcome to put goggles on. 
> 
> Thanks for Linc for her absolutely fabulous fan mix (http://8tracks.com/rawr-loncat/the-world-s-spinning-on)  
> (It’s gorgeous, please go take a listen) and also for creating Pacific Rim Minibang, as well as everyone else who’s reading/ participating. Feedback is welcome, and I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Based on the idea that if Chuck had had someone to go back to, his behavior might have made a lot more sense.

I. 

He'd met her in the spring. Australian Spring, fresh off a drift, his first with his father, and so full of bitterness and rage that he'd been unable to stay in that room in Sydney's shatterdome a moment longer.  
She'd been the waitress at the bar he'd gone, just barely sixteen, looking as wry and tired as he felt.  
Her name had been Lena, and she'd sat with him all night, serving him sodas and chatting him up, making him smile when he hadn't thought anything would ever make him smile again, the memories of his mother's death still fresh in the front of his mind. He'd eventually calmed enough to go back to the barracks he shared with his dad, reasonable enough now to resist saying things he'll regret later.

It'd been love at first sight. She was tough, and beautiful and blonde, with hair that looked like sunshine, gold all the way through, and skin bronze enough to match. 

He doesn't know, really, what made him love her, doesn't know what it was about her that made him feel so ridiculously happy all the bloody time, but she could, and he, God help him, he did. His father began to notice when he was always sneaking out after mess to see her. He'd gotten a little bit of teasing, but not too much, from the rest of Striker's crew, he suspects they were just relieved that he finally had someone other than his bulldog to love. (And Lena loved Max, thought he was the cutest thing.) His dad and Lena got along well enough, she treated him with a sort of neutral diffidence that Chuck wishes he could summon when it comes to his father, wishes that he didn't have nothing but bitterness and vinegar to offer his old man.

He wishes that he had more of a family to give her, Lena's an orphan all the way round, no family anywhere to call her own. She'd been in a children's home until she was fourteen, then left, and the way her face went pale and quiet when she mentioned it told Chuck just about everything he needed to know. 

He tells her about his brief stint in foster care while the old man killed some kaiju, how when he'd finally come back around after almost a year he been pretty enraged by the condition his son had been in.  
Chuck had gone to academy the week after he'd been released from the hospital, hadn't seen his father again until their first drift together, and though they'd almost shredded one another's minds, the handshake had held steady and firm, and they'd managed to keep Sydney safe ever since they joined forces. They change Striker's logo the third kajiu they kill, Lena doodling a picture of Max on a bar napkin.  
It's the first thing they've agreed on in years, and when Lena turns eighteen, she moves into the shatterdome with him. They get their own rack, and she makes it better than he or his dad's ever managed, with little curtains in the window, and a double bed. She finds a few old comforters, soft and worn with time, and managed to jerry rig a television signal too. She's pretty proud of herself, when she shows him her modifications before she goes off to work, and he has to admit that it looks nice in here. 

He tries to reciprocate by making her dinner, but he just ends up getting chow from the mess, his father helping him carry it back to the room, smiling.  
Herc looks impressed by the space, and Chuck notices that the next time he goes in, there's a mess of soft comforters on the bed, and a pair of sackcloth curtains in the windows. 

The world is violent now, and that’s no surprise, but it still makes Chuck’s blood run cold when Lena shows up home with a dark ring of bruises around her wrist and a heavy one under her eye. He can barely keep his head long enough to hiss, “Who?”  
Lena shrugs, flopping down on the bed and telling him, “It doesn’t matter now Chuck. He’s in lock up, and I’m pressing charges. Come to bed, hmm?”  
Chuck is left between wanting to hold his wife and wanting to pound some other man’s face in. Lena just laughs and tells him, “Chuck darling, I already broke his nose. I’m tired, and my arm hurts. Come to bed.”  
That’s all it takes, and he gets her some ice first, wrapping his arms around her and breathing in the scent of her hair while she composes herself for a moment, murmuring, and “Spooked me a little.”  
He huffs out a laugh, combing a hand through her hair and telling her, “Spooked me a little bit.”  
“You were angry –“  
The timidity in her voice takes him back a minute before he pulls himself together enough to murmur, “Not at you, love. Never at you. It’s nothing you did.” He pauses for a moment to collect himself, then murmurs, “He hurt you.”  
“I took care of it.”  
“Well, you shouldn’t have to. You have me now.”  
She laughs at that, tells him, “Chuck, I’m not going to run to you every time someone gets fresh.” She sees the look on his face, then says, “And I’m not quitting either. I like the money – I like the freedom, Chuck, all right?”  
She looks at him seriously, until he nods, then he murmurs, “You really broke his nose.”  
“Yeah. I really did.”  
That’s when he decides he loves her. 

There's no birth control, and he and Lena both can't keep their hands off each other, so no one but him is really surprised when she ends up knocked up. He doesn't know how to explain it, but he supposes that he'd always thought that he was broken in some way, unable to bring life into the world. Not to mention the radiation he was constantly bombarded with having effects. It's nothing lethal or even sickening usually, but after he and dad have that fifteen hour outside of Sydney, he wakes up in a hospital bed with Lena asleep with her head on the side of the bed, and his hand clasped firmly in his. He has mild radiation poisoning, his dad too, and they end up on bed rest for a while, and he'll only let Lena in with him once about a billion doctors and someone who used to be a gynecologist assure him that he won't hurt the baby if he cuddles with his wife.  
It's only after he realizes that the man called Lena his wife, and neither one of them bothered to disagree.

The rub of it, is that he has to leave, they know he has to, and when he and his dad suit up to take down that last kaiju (wall of life, really?) he knows that this is it, it's curtains, he's going to have to pack up and leave his wife, and this thing that's taken over her belly, and go to Hong Kong, go to the breach, go to the Kaiju, go the end of the world. And he and his dad are self-aware enough to realize that this very might well be a one way trip. 

He doesn't tell Lena that, doesn't tell her that her child might not have a father, that his son, (and it'll be a son, Hansen's run to sons) might not ever know a dad, that he might be a more absentee father then even Herc was.  
He doesn't want that for him, for his wife, for his child, but there's nothing else for it, he can't have everything he wants (sometimes it feels more like he can't have anything he wants.)

It makes him tired, and brittle, and ready to snap at the slightest provocation, and his father knows it, because he says nothing, just sits silent and stalwart as the plane takes off, nudging Max towards his feet as if he knows which of the two of them needs the pup more right now.  
Chuck wants to hate him, but he just can't.

And Beckett, Chuck wants to hate Beckett so very very much, because he's someone with nothing to lose. He thinks about how restful that must be, to have nothing to lose, to be able to sleep and wake up and know that if you stopped one day, nobody would miss you.

He thinks it would be restful, thinks Beckett doesn't know about how desperate a man will get to protect his family.  
But then he thinks about Beckett killing a Kaiju all by himself, about him piloting Gypsy Danger fifteen minutes along the miracle mile, and knows that there's very little Beckett doesn't know about desperation.

He still hits him, apologizes to Mako later, but finds himself missing Lena more and more as the weeks go on. He misses his wife, the smell of her skin and the way her hair tickled him. How she smiles at him in the morning and kisses the top of his head at night.  
His father commiserates, of course, but Chuck tries not to complain too much around the old man, because his wife is dead.  
It's something Chuck doesn't even want to think about. 

 

Lena calls him every night, tells him all about Sydney, what's going on there, how much his kid is kicking her in the ribs. They joke that maybe he'll be a footy player one day, (Chuck thinks that would be grand, not just to have a kid that plays footy, but to have a kid who grows up in the world not worrying about anything more important than a stupid game.) 

Herc takes a turn talking to her too, telling her about the usual gossip and chatter from the dome. She and Alexis have always gotten along well, and Chuck is glad that his wife has friends around her, as Jaeger pilots, and their wives, have gotten less and less common.  
He wants Lena to have someone – just in case he doesn’t make it back - 

Lena goes into labor the night Mako just about blasts them all sky high with Gypsy’s blasters, and Chuck spends most of the night in the labs with the only good satellite hookup, watching as his wife (his beautiful, wonderful wife) brings his son into the world.  
As soon as he claps eyes on him everything in his life (everything in his world,) changes, and nothing matters, but that kid.  
Oh, he’d thought he’d known what love was before, with Lena, and her baby bump, but now, now he understands what drove his father, that day, in that helicopter, what’s been driving the man ever since. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do for that kid.  
He does the best he can, in an emotionally constipated Hansen way, to show his father his new found knowledge.  
He names his son Hercules. 

Newt takes a still of his newborn face, for him, and even his father tears up a little when he sees the sprog’s face. Chuck talks on the phone to Lena until she finally passes out from exhaustion, and the nurse comes to put his son safe away in the nursery.  
He doesn’t sleep that night, just lies in bed and stares and the picture of his son, reading the information Hermann had scribbled out on the back.  
Hercules Hansen  
8 pounds, 10 ounces  
Fifteen inches long  
Born Seventh January 2025

Beckett tries to make nice in the morning, but Chuck just snarls, “Sod off Beckett.” And goes to take Max for a walk.

He spends the night after his father breaks his arm waiting for the doctor to tell him how the surgery to reduce the swelling went, then sitting with the old man while he’s on the good drugs. The old man doesn’t say much, just clutches Chucks hand in his own, telling him that he loves him once, before drifting in and out on the Percocet.

The next four days are just spent watching, and waiting. He talks to Lena every spare minute of every day, hijacks Newt and Hermann’s webcam so many times he knows the passwords, and shows off his grainy pic of his son so many times to the Striker Crew that they all know the info by heart. They’re patient with him though, some of them fathers (or past fathers) themselves, and awfully fond of Lena.  
He waits to tell her about the Kaidanovsky’s even though his father offers to do it. But there are some things, she shouldn’t hear about from anyone but him.  
She cries, because of course she cries, but she pulls herself together long enough to shush his frantic apologizing, telling him,” I know there was nothing you could’ve done, Chas, baby – you and Herc both. Don’t do that to yourself, alright, darling?” He agrees, eventually, but he doesn’t mean it, and she can tell.  
Alexis and Sasha Kaidanovsky are just the latest names on a very long list of people he failed to save. 

Everyone is always surprised later, but he never remembers much about the breach. The doctors (and there’s a lot of them, after) tell him that it was probably stress, not to mention emotional upheaval. His body was too busy trying to survive to make memories.  
His father always seemed pleased that he didn’t recall it, and he guessed that it wasn’t something that he’d want his son to remember, the worst memory of everyone else’s life.  
He remembers his father’s words, and the picture of his son. Kissing Max goodbye, Pentecost, the white light and nothing else.  
He knows Lena is there when he wakes up.  
 

II.

Herc doesn’t want to call her.  
He doesn’t want to call the woman that Chuck – that his son, had loved, and maybe that makes him a coward, but he doesn’t – can’t, bring himself to care.  
He lays with his son’s dog in the barrack they’d shared in Hong Kong Shatterdome, staring at the ceiling and trying not to give into the short, heavy sobs that threaten to break his chest in half. He fingers his phone and hopes Scott finds out from the news, because like hell he’s going to call the bastard.  
He tries to ignore the banging at his door, when that doesn’t work, yells “Fuck off!” and it goes away for a minute, until a broad Aussie accent tells him, “Sir – Herc – they found Striker.”  
So? So what they found that stupid bloody tub that’s cost him everything good in his life? What’s he care? Served its purpose after all.

He snarls out, “And what-a-bloody ‘bout it?” Before realizing that he’s the Marshall and it’s his job to care about washed up Jaegers.  
There’s another slow pause, then the man said, “Sir, both the escape pods were deployed.”

Lena calls him as he’s getting into the helicopter to fly down to the scattering of islands where his son has been found, and Herc makes himself answer the phone, makes himself tell her that no, he doesn’t know what’s gone on just yet, but that he’s hoping for something better than what he’d had to tell her before.  
She lets him off the line with instructions to tell her as soon as he knows anything, so she can know if there’s a point in coming up to Hong Kong, or if she should just wait at this point. Herc doesn’t really know what to tell her, a  
Other than that he'll call as soon as he has news (that's a lie, and she knows it, because he's know about Chuck for almost a day now, and he still hadn’t told her.  
The pods are up on the beach, shattered and raw looking, and it breaks Herc's heart just to look at them.  
He should have told Lena that her husband was dead, not fostered false hope.  
There can be no life here.

The pods are both of them sprawled out on the narrow, shelly beach, gravel cracking under Herc's boots and as he treads up the beach he wants to go back, turn aside.  
He doesn't let himself. He owes his son that much, at least.

He goes to Chuck first, lets the tech help him unscrew the top of the pod, then reaches in to touch his son's skin.  
He finds it hotter than Australian summer, and he can't help but shout a little, overjoyed.  
Chuck is in a helicopter within the hour, wrapped in shock blankets, and hooked up to an IV, thick straps keeping him secured to a gurney.  
He'd woken a little, tried to thrash, and Herc had had to try to reason with him, gently. It hadn't worked - not really, his son had been too upset, too worked up to do anything but thrash weakly, and the medic, in the end, had just given him a shot of something that drained all the fight out of him.  
The important thing, though was that his son had a pulse, the thing that Herc had been tracing with his eyes since the minute they put the monitor on.  
So does Pentecost, though the grim look on the medic's face suggests it might not be for much longer. Herc doesn't want to hear that, but it's less of a concern for him right now. Not when his son was alive and breathing. 

They take him to Hong Kong, then ship Chuck out to Ramstein almost immediately, and he has to call Lena and tell her that they've moved him again, along with Beckett, and Stacker, are going to try to stabilize all three. They’re not hopeful about Stacker, not at all, but they won't rule it out either. Stranger things have happened. Him and Mako ride along with the medic crew, and he spends most of the flight holding his son's hand while patting Max's doggy kennel apologetically since it was a cargo flight and the dog couldn't be loose.  
Upon their arrival in Ramstein, Chuck is wheeled away followed by five or six people running alongside his gurney, and Mako and Herc are relegated to the waiting room in sick bay, where Herc drinks a lot of bad coffee, and eventually, Mako is called away to see to her Sensei.  
She comes out, a little later, sniffing and telling him, "He would like to see you now."

Stacker Pentecost looks as formidable in death as he did in life, and even the many tubes and monitors that tether the man to the bed do nothing to diminish him. Herc stands by the bed for a long time just holding Stack's hand, not saying anything as the man looks up at him, sadly.

There's too much between the two of them now, too long a history to sum it up with some pithy comments and sentimentality.  
Stacks knows, anyway.

He spends another six hours in the waiting room, only leaving to talk on the phone a few times arrange a flight for Lena, and bring Hermann and Mrs. Gottleib up to Ramstein for her to deliver. Newt tags along for the ride, and Herc doesn't care. The man makes his son smile, and that's certainly no bad thing. 

He's almost asleep when he's summoned by a very imperious looking nurse to a conference room that's white and sterile, and Herc is thinking, hoping that this isn't the room where they take you to tell you your son is dead. 

Chuck's not dead, though he cut it awful close, and that's all Herc hears before his knees give out and the screen goes white. He hears the doctor, far off in the background yelling for coffee and blankets, and he thinks Chuck must be cold. Poor sprog always did get cold easy.  
His vision ungrays as he's looking at the floor, the doctor holding his head still between his knees as he counts slowly up to ten, telling him, "Breathe in, and out, there we go. Ranger Hansen, I'm going to put an IV in, just to level your electrolytes out, yeah?"  
He nods, weakly, feels the sharp bite of a needle, and he hisses a little as the cold solution floods in. The doctor mumbles something about putting it in a heater, and the nurse must agree, because the temperature gets a little bit better after a few minutes. The doctor talks to him gently, once he can lift his head again. Telling him, "I know that this must be overwhelming, Ranger Hansen, I know that, but your son is going to be all right, provided he takes the proper precautions. Honestly, the worst damage was to his spleen, and he can live without that. He's young and healthy, that's in his favor, but that fever is going up and up, and we're testing for systemic infection now. Of course shock doesn't help, not to mention the mental damage that the drift must have done."  
He sees Herc's look of panic, and tells him, "All in all, we're optimistic, Ranger, but he's going to need his family around him, so I suggest that you make some calls."  
Herc has already done that, Lena was the only call, for them both, and she's on the way. He asks about Beckett, and gets a slightly less favorable report. Basically damage upon damage, the doctor said, "Quite frankly, it's a wonder he was functional enough to drop the payload. I recommend rest, Marshall, and lots of it. I'd contact his brother, if you can."  
Herc nodded. He'd already called Yancy, the man had promised to be there as soon as possible. The pilot had made some less than complementary remarks about Stacker’s ancestry, telling Herc, "He should never have gotten back into a Jaeger."  
Herc didn't disagree. Raleigh is lying still and quiet on the bed, barely even responsive, and he puts a hand on the boy's shoulder, telling him, "Your brother will be here soon, mate. Just hang on, all right?"  
He gets a soft, struggling nod, and then nothing else.  
He sighs and goes back to his son. 

Chuck is sleeping still, machines beeping reassuringly. There seems to be an ease to him that there wasn't before, and Herc doesn't know if that's good progress or good drugs. Either way, it's reassuring to see his pain out of pain and into natural sleep.  
Chuck sleeps through the night, thankfully, and the next morning Herc rides with a car to the airport, and picks up his daughter in law.  
Lena is sitting quiet and still in the car, but she smiles when she sees him, shielding the child strapped to her chest with care. She still needs help getting out of the car, but for the most part seems in good health.  
Herc hadn't wanted her traveling so soon after delivery, but Lena hadn't stood for anything once she'd found the baby would be fine to travel. She'd informed Herc frankly that since she was not a widow, she'd be with her husband, thank you.  
Herc hadn't had the wherewithal to argue with her, but then, he'd never had the wherewithal (Chuck either, which is partly why he thinks his son's marriage has lasted this long. Lena is a tough woman to withstand, mostly because she's usually right.) 

She deals with this with her usual efficiency, chivying Herc into bed with the bribe of letting him hold his namesake. He doesn't remember much after that, but he wakes late in the afternoon to find that Lena has been sitting with Chuck, and left little Hercules in Tendo Choi's keeping.  
Tendo is happy enough to babysit for her, but doesn't begrudge Herc the time. He certainly can't get enough of the baby, and wants Chuck to be able to see him.  
Of course his son isn't even awake yet. But Lena says that the doctor is more hopeful, and in truth Chuck does seem better. He checks in on Beckett too, and finds the man better, the appearance of his brother easing him a bit.  
The main worry for Chuck now is infection, but he's going to live. The question now is just how sick he's going to be. 

He is there, along with Lena when his son comes back into the land of the living, gasping for air once the tube is removed, and reaching for Lena, then him, then Max. He stares at his wife like she's the sun in the sky, and when Herc takes his other hand, he positively beams.  
The only thing missing in his son's world, right now, is his own son. He asks for Hercules a few times, but he can't hold his baby until there's a chance that neither one of them will infect the other, and that probably won't be for another week or so. Chuck's disappointed, but kept from his usual amount of annoyance by a boatload of good drugs. The ease with which Chuck acquiesces is a little disconcerting, if a bit of a relief. He'll be happy when his son is back to his usual surly self.  
Things progress quickly after Lena is there. Chuck improves by leaps and bounds, his health rebounding quickly, though his immune system still struggles.  
The first time Chuck holds his son he cries, and does all the parent things, smiling at every movement and counting fingers and toes. New parenthood is like a stabilizing effect on his son, making him almost always happy and content. Max for his part, loves the Sprog, taking it as his personal mission to protect the child from everything.  
It does his heart good to see his son wandering around the halls of the shatterdome with his grandson in his arms and Max trailing loyally behind. Unsurprisingly it’s Lena that struggles the most with all the change. Parenting is hard of course, and harder when your own health takes a slow turn upwards. Lena is run absolutely ragged, and Herc comes in to find her trying to quiet the baby and help Chuck through a particularly bad cramp in his back, all while on no sleep herself. He gets the baby sleeping and then sends her to sleep in one of the guest racks, as long as she wants, then spends the afternoon sitting beside his son, lying hot compresses and trying to get the kinks out of the muscles. Chuck is quiet and still, and their silence reminds Herc of the drift, without the push and pull of their minds back and forth.  
For him, the best part is when he tells Chuck that he's proud of him, and Chuck smiles at him sleepily before murmuring, "I know."  
He gets both his boys asleep and comfortable, and spends the rest of the night simply leaning against the door and listening to his family sleep. 

He retires after they get everything stabilized, a new Marshall from what's left of the UN coming to take over his job. Beckett gets packed off with his brother, Yancy saying something about going on a bit of a holiday. Beckett for his part, is better, but still far too quiet and still for anyone's taste, much less Chuck's. 

Chuck had been concerned about Beckett when he'd heard how badly that second solitary drift had hurt the man, and made enough of an effort to draw the man out of his shell that he had at least become a bit of a safe harbor, though Yancy was still the lodestone for the younger man. The fact of the matter is that Raleigh was never going to be the same man as he had been before. It wasn't going to happen. He'd been damaged, perhaps irreparably by the events.  
God forgive him, he was just glad that hadn't happened to Chuck. 

They buy a house on the outs of Melbourne, a little two tier thing, with both of their pensions and the generous severance package from the PPDC. They're one of the first neighborhoods to be fit for occupation again, and they suddenly find themselves rubbing elbows with people a hell of a lot more powerful than two war veterans and an ex-barmaid. Chuck is annoyed, Herc is exasperated, and Lena watches with soft, easy amusement as their neighbors fawn over Chuck and himself respectively. Chuck thinks that it's all a waste of time until he gets to meet Hugh Jackman (who's actually a pretty decent bloke) at a PPDC fundraiser for Kaiju victims. Herc never gets to meet anyone interesting, and thinks the entire thing is a waste of his time. He's happy enough with his projects and his house, (and all the maintenance house takes, Chuck helping out when he feels well enough.) He's grateful for the chance to see his grandson grow, to help his daughter in law with the dishes, to take his son out to the surf for a day and not worry about monsters. He goes to church for the first time in years, for his grandson's dedication, and enjoys it more than he thought he would. He is coming full circle, back to Australia and his family and he is happy to be unimportant once more. 

He never wanted importance. Never needed it either.

The world moves on. Politicians and governments went back to trying to kill one another. The apparently miraculous ability of the world to get along only applies when it’s ending.  
Herc doesn’t really care. He spends his days with his family, and on the fifth anniversary of Breach Day he sits on the porch to the backyard, watching his son and his grandson playing touch football with the Beckett brothers, Max running and Barking at them all with equal censure. Chuck lifts his son up above his shoulder and the boy squeals with laughter, happy and joyous and feeling absolutely safe. He still has that child's faith that no matter what happens, everything is going to be all right. 

Herc feels the same way.


End file.
